Love and Information

Reviewed by Amanda L. Andrei
Antaeus Theatre Company
Through April 3

RECOMMENDED

I have an ongoing conversation with a colleague who says that plays and computer simulations are essentially the same: you take the code (play script), run the simulation (rehearse and produce), and see the results (audience reaction). Over time, as the simulation continues to run (consider this for a single production, or productions over a stretch of time), you can eventually average the results together and use it to inform decision-making (consider this in the context of how you live your life, or how you canonize a playwright).

If we go with this theory, Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information isn’t merely a computer simulation — it’s a complex emergent system highly dependent on initial conditions. In other words: From the script may arise wildly different outcomes depending on which production you see at any given theater company. And this version at Antaeus, directed by Emily Chase, provides a heady, packed performance with bright spots of emotion, giving you the closest feeling you’ll get in a theater to being a node in the Internet.

The thing you should know about Churchill’s play is that it has no stage directions, character descriptions, or names. Written in 2012 (the same year that “selfie” was named a Top 10 Buzzword by Time Magazine), it consists of roughly 50 vignettes dispersed over seven sections, which can be shuffled randomly within their sections. In her director notes, Chase remarks that they practiced “consensual casting,” where the actors freely developed their roles from their own perspectives. In this way, Chase and the ensemble (John Apicella, Anne Gee Byrd, Darius De La Cruz, Kwana Martinez, Kevin Matsumoto, Erin Pineda, Lloyd Roberson II, and Zoe Yale) have not merely directed and performed this experience, they have curated and built a world from it.

And what a fascinating world. A discussion at a party about lab work on chicken brains turns flirtatious, charmingly played by Pineda and Roberson. A heated conversation about giving up an informant’s name is tragically hilarious given its mobster implications (Martinez and Apicella). Neurodivergence becomes tenderly addressed through a photographic memory of the movie Godzilla (De La Cruz and Byrd). A family secret is revealed during a video game (Pineda and Yale) with the potential for disaster. A young person on their laptop (Yale) insists they are deeply in love while an elder (Byrd) argues that they cannot love a “thing,” a “computer.” And a guitarist who didn’t remember he could play guitar (nimbly performed by Matsumoto) serenades the audience in a duet (with Apicella) that his fingers remembered, even if his mind didn’t.

Frederica Nascimento’s minimalist design with its wide stairs, central robin’s egg blue couch, and exposed cables provide much flexibility and contrast for glitchy projections and sounds (designed by Ly Eisenstein and John Zalewski, respectively), overlapping at times with the actors and other times simply displayed on their own.

There were times where I wished the scenes would go on longer or that there were more breaths between moments so that I could sit quietly in the emotions being stirred within me — but then, this feeling of acceleration mimics how we may often feel caught in our world that, despite its increased connection through virtual space, somehow seems more fragmented and anxious than ever.

Here’s the saving grace: Information is vast, but so is love. However, in a play about love in its forms (family, friendship, sex, romance), and information in its forms (science, memory, language, knowledge, time), I found myself wondering about another concept that seems more elusive amidst the shuffling of emotion and intellect: truth.

Ultimately, who are these people that we see, whether in the flesh or on the screen? Where are these settings that zip back and forth so quickly? And what would happen, how would meaning change, if these scenes were made random in a different way? In our discussion of plays and computer simulations, my colleague and I go back to an aphorism common in statistics: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” That is to say, a model can only ever approximate the phenomenon it is observing — it’s what we do with the model results that become relevant. Dare I extend this aphorism to drama?

Whether this dazzling production (or simulation) of Love and Information delights or confounds, staging it more than decade after its first premiere gives us a precious opportunity for reflection. Amidst all the clamor about intimacy, technology, and directions we’re headed, where might we find more quiet moments of truth?

Antaeus Theatre Company – Kiki & David Gindler Performing Arts Center, 110 East Broadway, Glendale; Fri.-Sat. & Mon., 8 pm; Sat.-Sun., 2 pm; through Apr. 3. Antaeus Company tickets. Running time: 90 minutes with no intermission.